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Author Sam Parker knows the power of kindness for business. A company in which employees take action to make things better for each other and for their customers is a company that works. It’s a company that ends up with a healthy and productive culture. And that means profit.

He calls it the Smile & Move principle.

It’s about going above and beyond to find ways to make a bigger difference for teammates, bosses, and customers, to practice random acts of kindness.

As a bonus, nothing boosts your own self-esteem as much as doing kind things for other people.

Our day is full of choices. Every time something doesn’t go right, you have a kind way and an unkind way to handle it. Your character is revealed by how you make those choices, time after time. Choose kindness. It costs you nothing, and in fact, those around you are more likely to reciprocate when you make the kind choice.

Back in college, my closest friends and I would joke around continuously. We’d laugh and we’d laugh. But sometimes, the joking would go just a little bit too far. We’d joke about someone in a way we wouldn’t do if they were there with us.

In those moments, I’d sit back and tell myself that if I weren’t the one overstepping the invisible boundary, well then, I was innocent. I was wrong about that.

You see, I could have stepped in. I could have voiced my opinion with saying “this is not okay!”

But I didn’t.

How often do you passively watch things occur that are inconsistent with your standard of ethics? Imagine just how easy it would be to step in.

Focus on orchestrating only ‘good things around you. Diligently intervene when you see otherwise.

Great businesses are composed of ordinary people who decide to come together to be GREAT. This happens best if we take a moment to define things that keep us from being our higher selves. And one of the biggest is inauthenticity—living and acting contrary to our own stated values and the team values we’ve agreed to.

You see it in many forms. Jim goes home each day and complains about his boss, but never goes to his boss and asks in a professional way for what he needs.

Tom comes late to work each Tuesday because he knows his boss is out on Tuesdays and probably won’t find out.

Inauthenticity is made up of those slips of integrity that people rationalize because “everybody does it.” Soon it permeates the workplace and kills the souls of the people who do it, not to mention those who are around it.

When someone in a workplace decides to begin living and working authentically, no matter what, it becomes contagious. It can be the beginning of a genuine transformation that sweeps through the culture of a company. I’ve seen it happen, over and over and over.

Make the choice today to become the great contributor you know you can be by putting inauthentic behaviors behind you once and for all.

Author Sam Parker knows the power of kindness for business. A company in which employees take action to make things better for each other and for their customers is a company that works. It’s a company that ends up with a healthy and productive culture. And that means profit.

He calls it the Smile & Move principle.

It’s about going above and beyond to find ways to make a bigger difference for teammates, bosses, and customers, to practice random acts of kindness.

As a bonus, nothing boosts your own self-esteem as much as doing kind things for other people.

Our day is full of choices. Every time something doesn’t go right, you have a kind way and an unkind way to handle it. Your character is revealed by how you make those choices, time after time. Choose kindness. It costs you nothing, and in fact, those around you are more likely to reciprocate when you make the kind choice.

Dan Sullivan, a consultant to entrepreneurs and financial analysts, once said that the purpose of employees is to build the confidence of the business owner.

When I first heard that, I thought it was one of the most arrogant things I’d ever heard! It took me about five to ten years to really figure out what he meant, and then I got it.

It’s about the way in which a successful business relies on a pyramid of trust.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know that you can’t be generative and come up with ideas and feel confident selling if you can’t count on your people to deliver and to live their word. Without that, the whole business suffers.

But I think it goes beyond the entrepreneur – it also applies to managers. The manager can’t feel confident and feel like he or she can go to customers and move things along unless they know that the employees are going to do what they say they will do.

So building the confidence of your boss essentially means that you are completely transparent about what you have done, about anything that might be undone, and clear about how you are going to get the plan accomplished. There should be absolutely no surprises. Hit your numbers, hit your deadlines, and let him or her know any time something might be out of alignment.